by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Conventional wisdom has it that you just can’t compare apples and oranges. Tell that to Montreal artist Heidi Taillefer while she makes a fruit salad out of the two. Taillefer straddles the often irreconcilable worlds of commercial and fine art, allowing them to feed into each other. Her works show a rich, photo-realistic precision and visual lingua franca that ad agencies die for, as well as the flair, elegance and psychological idiosyncrasies demanded by discerning galleries. The best of both worlds, or perhaps a lonely no-man’s-land between them.

The recurring theme of Taillefer’s paintings over the years has been a blurring of the line between the organic and the inanimate. She painstakingly assembles living things—horses, cherubs, elephants, cats aplenty and the occasional pregnant woman—out of precisely rendered, seemingly incongruous objects.

“It’s like writing out a sentence letter by letter rather than as one cursive signature,” says Taillefer. “Some people try to express an idea in as few words as possible, to be as concise as possible. I was doing the opposite, trying to represent the image with different levels of interpretation based on which elements you look at, at the same time. Which isn’t easy to do, actually. It’s pretty calculated.”

First came the frog

When she began drawing and painting, and for the first few years of her professional career, the idea was a straightforward bio-mechanical fusion familiar to anyone who’s watched a Japanese cartoon or picked up Heavy Metal magazine.

In her Park Ex studio, Taillefer looks back to her teenage days taking private art courses with Renate Heidersdorf, a nationally-respected art instructor and landscape painter. “I think the first one I did was a mechanical frog, a metallic frog with plates riveted on its back, wires and coils and a pair of tweezers on the ground. That was in ’86, I think. You know what the real inspiration was? This is gonna sound so tacky. It was Terminator—I loved the look of the robot skeletons. That was the trigger that started it. Not very profound, but when you’re a teenager, you’re easily influenced by things like that.”

Taillefer had no idea that she’d effectively established a distinct style that would remain, subtle variations notwithstanding, to this day. In fact, after high school, she had no intention of pursuing art (opting for the far more exciting world of Canadian History). And she didn’t want to stay here either. “I went to the Yukon to find the furthest point I could get away too. I was addicted to the Dempster highway—just trekking and ridge-walking for days on end without running into anybody. When I came back to Montreal, it was like an epiphany. I was on the 20 in the car with my dad and I just understood, suddenly, that I was going to be an artist. It was weird, I was so excited. For a week I was bouncing off the walls. It was like I’d won the lottery, just understanding where I was going to go.

“When I made that decision, everything conspired to make it work. Someone would introduce me to someone, an illustrator I met who was really successful at the time, said, ‘Why don’t you go into illustration, you could make money doing that while you’re doing your painting.’ I started doing research on how to break into the field—I wasn’t in school, so I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. What we were doing at Renate’s was watercolour with a black outline—that’s where I was at. I had to learn how to do hyperrealism, airbrushing and all that. At the same time, I was trying to hone my skills with the painting. That’s why my paintings ended up looking commercial, because I was taking the style and developing it and building it.”

Helpful heartbreak

Build it did. Taillefer would go on to win awards at numerous competitions, score lucrative ad design gigs and hang works at the Indianapolis Grand Prix and the McAllen Museum of Art and Science in Texas. The big fish, though, was painting the familiar Dralion beast for Cirque de Soleil—Cirque founder Guy Laliberté is so enamoured of her work that he also commissioned her to design the tattoo that covers his entire back.

But she felt that something was missing in her personal works. A trip to South America led to heartbreak and by extension a refreshed vision in her paintings, as intricate emotional symbolism replaced the straight-ahead biomechanics.

“I had a romance, a really dramatic, almost movie-like thing. It was tempestuous, addictive and drug-like. I’ve never done heroin, but I’m assuming that to cut it off and go cold turkey must be the same thing. It represented a lifestyle that I wanted to live before the art. I went into art and it was a totally different world. Then comes this echo from the past, in the form of a guy I was crazy about at the time. It was screwed up and couldn’t have worked, but what it showed me was that I was weak in the love department, as most people are, I guess. And it suddenly gave my work an actual flavour, a spin that had some substance beyond the combination of technology and nature.

“As a teen I was idealistic about factory farming and the environment, a lot of ethical issues. I was focused on that, appalled at the world and the way it works. The art lent itself to exorcising these observations about how the world was overwrought with technological advancement, becoming sterilized and clinical, so hands-off and isolated. When that got dry, after the relationship, my work became symbolic all of the sudden. I did this cupid painting which was all about the trials and tribulations of being in love with someone who’s really bad for you.”

Insect jocks and Venus envy

Taillefer’s still on the see-saw though. The art world might find her paintings obtuse and even kitschy, for all their complicated eye candy and heart-on-the-sleeve emoting. Conversely, her morbid streak and graphic biology is at times too much for the commercial scene.

“I did some sketches for an NFL promo—a post-production company wanted some character designs of alien creatures that were half man, half insect. It was a really good idea, so I did these images, and they said they were too violent. They said they wanted them to look powerful and warrior-like. Then they said they were too scary. It didn’t scare me, but there’s something in me that goes that far.”

Even in the galleries, her penchant for raw, difficult, at times jarring imagery can hit the wrong note with more sensitive viewers. “Some like it, other people will shudder. Like that pregnant woman I painted—it’s a homage to motherhood. It’s a pretty feminist painting—just the name, the title is ‘Venus Envy.’ To me it was validating, glorifying motherhood. People would look at it and think I was mutilating women. To them it was horrific, disturbing, tortured representation. To me, it’s not that at all.”

Heidi Taillefer’s Solipsisme show is at
O Patro Vys until September 27

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